Ballard Throws In The Towel on The Hydrogen Car

They have been the great H2 hope for years, the Ballard fuel cell. They are in Hondas, Mercedes and Mitsubishis. Yet as the hydrogen hype grows, this industry leader's stock has declined from $210 in 2000 to around $5 today. Now they are in talks with part owners Daimler and Ford to dump the automotive fuel cell business. Analyst John Hykawy says "The problem has always been, can you do it for a cost that matters to anybody and the jury is still out on that one, and the other side is that once you have it in the car, can you actually make hydrogen at a reasonable price and supply it in an infrastructure and the answer to that at this point seems to be no."

Tyler Hamilton at Clean Break thinks that the "momentum is on the side of battery technology and the infrastructure to support it needs to be extended and upgraded, instead of created from scratch" and "millions of "smart" electric cars plugged into the grid can offer an extremely valuable way of managing electricity supply and demand and smoothing out peaks." Good points at ::Clean Break